4 ms·

"do the right thing" is difficult when you are suppressing free speech on a platform that's supposed to be all about it.

Atlantium 8y ago
Alex Jones is free to express his speech on his own website as much as he pleases. "Free Speech" is not about forcing a company to host content they don't like. That would be against Twitter's freedoms. Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  maybe you haven’t noticed, but people have been going after hosting companies and payment processors lately to shut down people they find politically disagreeable. we are increasingly less and less free to host our own speech.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Then run your own hosting company and accept money via Bitcoin. You can't just force third party companies to do whatever you want.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
      - 0x4f3759df 8y ago
        Hate speech is a phony political category. Hate Christians and white people? Well that's just fine. Have a Twitter account that retweets verified people saying 'kill all whites'? That'll get you banned.
      - nyolfen 8y ago
        just realized i replied to the wrong comment, apologies
    - 0x4f3759df 8y ago
      I don't see why he can't just terraform Mars and built his own Internet and Twitter there.
  - LocalH 8y ago
    Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government. Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech. Sure, you can sit in a private conversion and say pretty much whatever you want. But, if you speak anywhere where the public can see it (even via private means), and you have an unpopular opinion, you have droves of people who try to shut you down. And it's not bad enough that they can get your access to your platform of choice revoked, some of these people will make it their life's mission to ensure that you lose your job or even worse become unemployable. Look at what happened to Conor Daly after something his father said ten years prior to Conor's birth surfaced. I'm waiting for the day when someone legitimately tries to argue that the rights of all of those descended from the Pilgrims should be taken away, since they took away the rights and land of Native Americans.
    - TheDong 8y ago
      > Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you. People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now. 100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same gender as me are attractive" or "I wanna do it in the butt" and also be persecuted by your friends, though now both of those phrases are unlikely to see you condemned. You can say more total things today without being persecuted I posit, however social persecution has been made into a far more public affair with the advent of social media and the 24/7 for-profit news cycle. I think your speech is more free, but we hear more stories of social consequences due to the nature of news and social media, which creates biases and persecution complexes. I admit I don't have numbers and facts to back it up, but neither do you have any evidence for your argument.
      - nyolfen 8y ago
  - TheDong 8y ago
    > shut down people they find politically disagreeable It's not that. Hate-speech is not political. Racism is not political. Morality is not all that political. Shutting down someone who denies shootings and is abusive to the victim's families and spews racism is not a political move. People should condemn disgusting hate speech regardless of their political affiliation.
    - boxspam 8y ago
      I hate how Xi Jinping is running China so strictly. The Russian Apartment Bombings was an inside job. Westerners should have no business in the Middle East.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
- marcrosoft 8y ago
  I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that it must be a hard decision because they've previously chosen what to censor in the past giving them a censorship bias. We now know twitter is not a place of free speech but a place with the slant of X.
- starik36 8y ago
  That's like saying: Alex Jones is free to grow his own food on his land as much as he pleases. This supermarket has a policy not to sell food to people who violate our terms of service regarding hate speech.
  - henryfjordan 8y ago
    The supermarket is free to not sell to any particular person on the basis that they constantly engage in hate speech. It gets murkier when they start banning classes of people or ban someone for something that puts them in a protected class, but any supermarket that banned Alex Jones for hate speech would be well within their rights.
    - starik36 8y ago
      Ok, let's take it one step further. All the supermarkets in town decide not to sell food to Alex Jones, essentially condemning him to starvation. Are you still good with that?
  - fuball63 8y ago
    It isn't unreasonable for a supermarket to forbid someone that is disturbing the peace from entering.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    If you go into a supermarket and start spewing hate-speech, yes they have every right to ban you. If you make other customers uncomfortable, they have every right to expel you. Alex Jones is spewing hate-speech on twitter, making other twitter users feel unwelcome, and so on. I don't see how this analogy is favorable to him at all. If you're abusive in a space to the point of causing mental pain to others, yes, you should be removed from it.
  - Atlantium 8y ago
    Exactly. You may not like that but that's the way it is.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
- trophycase 8y ago
  Jack Dorsey frequently said in the hearing that he wanted Twitter to be like a "public square" or "public forum". In fact he used the word "public" quite a bit, which is weird if you don't want to be regulated.
- boxspam 8y ago
  > Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience. Current audience. What about a new young audience? What about the part of the audience that wants to listen to him on Twitter? > That would be against Twitter's freedoms. I think you should be able to fire your users for being assholes. But I do realize the slippery slope here. I could discriminate on race, political preference, smell, weight, sexuality, age, etc. and that causes me to label someone an asshole. Now Twitter, the biggest public and digital town square of our future, labels you an asshole, but does not specify exactly why. The global media town crier goes around town telling everyone you are now the new village idiot. Even if you vehemently agree with their decision, this should give you pause: How could such a system be hacked by adversaries/what vulnerabilities are exposed? How much unchecked social/tribal power is held in the hands of the few? What would such a system look like if it is artificially/clumsily converged to a majority opinion ideology chamber? Then, will you still be heard by your audience if you have a dissenting/unpopular/asshole opinion? Not too long ago "homosexuality is not a mental disorder" was an unpopular opinion. Do you trust our current evolution enough to say: "We are there. We can now freeze our morals and views."
mmanfrin 8y ago
Twitter is not 'supposed to be all about [free speech]'. It's a microblogging platform, not a political stance.
- pokemongoaway 8y ago
  What's your evidence of this? They've banned a variety of people who criticize the mainstream. I support the parent message - they are a platform, not a publisher. Twitter is the one making this political by deciding who is worth censoring and who is not. They would never censor pro-war NYT/Post folks...
natex 8y ago
This is wrong. Is Twitter suppressing Jones' ability to say what he wants to? No. So they are not suppressing free speech. Twitter is banning a serial harasser from using their (privately owned) platform. The analogy would be kicking someone out of your house for harassing your other guests.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > So they are not suppressing free speech. Twitter is banning a serial harasser from using their (privately owned) platform. I’d argue Twitter is the modern day town square and it doesn’t matter if it is privately owned.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Yes. Agreed. Furthermore, Jones is a symptom. Banning him does cure the true problem. Does banning the likes of Jones make the MSM any more trustable? Or the MSM any more responsible? That seems unlikely.
themoonbus 8y ago
Nobody's free speech rights were violated? I can't believe this has to be explained on hackernews... https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- noisem4ker 8y ago
  Other than a constitutional right, free speech is a principle in itself.
HBlix 8y ago
How are they suppressing free speech? They’re not the government, they get to control their service just like any business, because they are also free.
- colordrops 8y ago
  This is a narrow view of the reality of speech in the US. Almost all public speech goes through private entities that are controlled by a small number of powerful connected people, giving them the de facto ability to censor speech.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
I can’t see anything that says it’s all about free speech. I can see this though. “Freedom of expression means little if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. We do not tolerate behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice. If you see something on Twitter that violates these rules, please report it to us.“ https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
hoosieree 8y ago
Twitter is "about" advertising; everything else is incidental. Bans only happen if Twitter believes that doing so (a) gains users or (b) prevents users from leaving. Hate speech, election meddling, threats of nuclear war - it all gets a free pass until it stops generating "impressions". But they only do it because we (as a group) let them get away with it. If 30% of Twitter users left, the platform wouldn't last a week.

Atlantium 8y ago

Alex Jones is free to express his speech on his own website as much as he pleases. "Free Speech" is not about forcing a company to host content they don't like. That would be against Twitter's freedoms. Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience.

nyolfen 8y ago
maybe you haven’t noticed, but people have been going after hosting companies and payment processors lately to shut down people they find politically disagreeable. we are increasingly less and less free to host our own speech.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Then run your own hosting company and accept money via Bitcoin. You can't just force third party companies to do whatever you want.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
    - 0x4f3759df 8y ago
      Hate speech is a phony political category. Hate Christians and white people? Well that's just fine. Have a Twitter account that retweets verified people saying 'kill all whites'? That'll get you banned.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      just realized i replied to the wrong comment, apologies
  - 0x4f3759df 8y ago
    I don't see why he can't just terraform Mars and built his own Internet and Twitter there.
- LocalH 8y ago
  Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government. Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech. Sure, you can sit in a private conversion and say pretty much whatever you want. But, if you speak anywhere where the public can see it (even via private means), and you have an unpopular opinion, you have droves of people who try to shut you down. And it's not bad enough that they can get your access to your platform of choice revoked, some of these people will make it their life's mission to ensure that you lose your job or even worse become unemployable. Look at what happened to Conor Daly after something his father said ten years prior to Conor's birth surfaced. I'm waiting for the day when someone legitimately tries to argue that the rights of all of those descended from the Pilgrims should be taken away, since they took away the rights and land of Native Americans.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    > Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you. People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now. 100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same gender as me are attractive" or "I wanna do it in the butt" and also be persecuted by your friends, though now both of those phrases are unlikely to see you condemned. You can say more total things today without being persecuted I posit, however social persecution has been made into a far more public affair with the advent of social media and the 24/7 for-profit news cycle. I think your speech is more free, but we hear more stories of social consequences due to the nature of news and social media, which creates biases and persecution complexes. I admit I don't have numbers and facts to back it up, but neither do you have any evidence for your argument.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
- TheDong 8y ago
  > shut down people they find politically disagreeable It's not that. Hate-speech is not political. Racism is not political. Morality is not all that political. Shutting down someone who denies shootings and is abusive to the victim's families and spews racism is not a political move. People should condemn disgusting hate speech regardless of their political affiliation.
  - boxspam 8y ago
    I hate how Xi Jinping is running China so strictly. The Russian Apartment Bombings was an inside job. Westerners should have no business in the Middle East.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
marcrosoft 8y ago
I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that it must be a hard decision because they've previously chosen what to censor in the past giving them a censorship bias. We now know twitter is not a place of free speech but a place with the slant of X.
starik36 8y ago
That's like saying: Alex Jones is free to grow his own food on his land as much as he pleases. This supermarket has a policy not to sell food to people who violate our terms of service regarding hate speech.
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  The supermarket is free to not sell to any particular person on the basis that they constantly engage in hate speech. It gets murkier when they start banning classes of people or ban someone for something that puts them in a protected class, but any supermarket that banned Alex Jones for hate speech would be well within their rights.
  - starik36 8y ago
    Ok, let's take it one step further. All the supermarkets in town decide not to sell food to Alex Jones, essentially condemning him to starvation. Are you still good with that?
- fuball63 8y ago
  It isn't unreasonable for a supermarket to forbid someone that is disturbing the peace from entering.
- TheDong 8y ago
  If you go into a supermarket and start spewing hate-speech, yes they have every right to ban you. If you make other customers uncomfortable, they have every right to expel you. Alex Jones is spewing hate-speech on twitter, making other twitter users feel unwelcome, and so on. I don't see how this analogy is favorable to him at all. If you're abusive in a space to the point of causing mental pain to others, yes, you should be removed from it.
- Atlantium 8y ago
  Exactly. You may not like that but that's the way it is.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
trophycase 8y ago
Jack Dorsey frequently said in the hearing that he wanted Twitter to be like a "public square" or "public forum". In fact he used the word "public" quite a bit, which is weird if you don't want to be regulated.
boxspam 8y ago
> Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience. Current audience. What about a new young audience? What about the part of the audience that wants to listen to him on Twitter? > That would be against Twitter's freedoms. I think you should be able to fire your users for being assholes. But I do realize the slippery slope here. I could discriminate on race, political preference, smell, weight, sexuality, age, etc. and that causes me to label someone an asshole. Now Twitter, the biggest public and digital town square of our future, labels you an asshole, but does not specify exactly why. The global media town crier goes around town telling everyone you are now the new village idiot. Even if you vehemently agree with their decision, this should give you pause: How could such a system be hacked by adversaries/what vulnerabilities are exposed? How much unchecked social/tribal power is held in the hands of the few? What would such a system look like if it is artificially/clumsily converged to a majority opinion ideology chamber? Then, will you still be heard by your audience if you have a dissenting/unpopular/asshole opinion? Not too long ago "homosexuality is not a mental disorder" was an unpopular opinion. Do you trust our current evolution enough to say: "We are there. We can now freeze our morals and views."

mmanfrin 8y ago

Twitter is not 'supposed to be all about [free speech]'. It's a microblogging platform, not a political stance.

pokemongoaway 8y ago
What's your evidence of this? They've banned a variety of people who criticize the mainstream. I support the parent message - they are a platform, not a publisher. Twitter is the one making this political by deciding who is worth censoring and who is not. They would never censor pro-war NYT/Post folks...

natex 8y ago

This is wrong. Is Twitter suppressing Jones' ability to say what he wants to? No. So they are not suppressing free speech. Twitter is banning a serial harasser from using their (privately owned) platform. The analogy would be kicking someone out of your house for harassing your other guests.

sheepmullet 8y ago
> So they are not suppressing free speech. Twitter is banning a serial harasser from using their (privately owned) platform. I’d argue Twitter is the modern day town square and it doesn’t matter if it is privately owned.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Yes. Agreed. Furthermore, Jones is a symptom. Banning him does cure the true problem. Does banning the likes of Jones make the MSM any more trustable? Or the MSM any more responsible? That seems unlikely.

themoonbus 8y ago

Nobody's free speech rights were violated? I can't believe this has to be explained on hackernews... https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/

noisem4ker 8y ago
Other than a constitutional right, free speech is a principle in itself.

HBlix 8y ago

How are they suppressing free speech? They’re not the government, they get to control their service just like any business, because they are also free.

colordrops 8y ago
This is a narrow view of the reality of speech in the US. Almost all public speech goes through private entities that are controlled by a small number of powerful connected people, giving them the de facto ability to censor speech.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

lostlogin 8y ago

I can’t see anything that says it’s all about free speech. I can see this though. “Freedom of expression means little if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. We do not tolerate behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice. If you see something on Twitter that violates these rules, please report it to us.“ https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...

hoosieree 8y ago

Twitter is "about" advertising; everything else is incidental. Bans only happen if Twitter believes that doing so (a) gains users or (b) prevents users from leaving. Hate speech, election meddling, threats of nuclear war - it all gets a free pass until it stops generating "impressions". But they only do it because we (as a group) let them get away with it. If 30% of Twitter users left, the platform wouldn't last a week.